Artwork Appreciation
The forest scene in this painting seems ordinary, but the composition has been deliberately invaded by white space, and mottled traces spread all the way from the grass back into the woods. The broken white spaces make this forest scene jump out of the ordinary, becoming like a scene in our minds, but also like the fragment of someone’s memory. Memory will be impaired by time. JHAN Jhuang-Syuan inserted winding manmade structures in the foreground of Landscape Painting_11 to create depth of field, while the sharp geometric figures shuttling through organic, broken lines form a formal contrast and create tension. Modeling paste is applied over the images of the trees and the manmade structure, which gives added height to the texture of the composition and produces an interesting sense of layering. JHAN Jhuang-Syuan is particularly fascinated by bleak and broken scenes. Because of the incomplete space, the viewer can imagine that behind the imagined or remembered scene lurk more stories yet to be told.